Unicist Logical Approach: Paradoxes in Innovation Marketing

For any businessman or woman it is self-evident that marketing implies competition with the alternatives the potential customers have in their minds. This implies seeking for the positioning as a first choice in a segment or if possible in the whole market.

But this cannot be done when an innovation is being marketed. Innovations have no substitutes; the alternatives the potential customers can have in their minds are either succedanea or inaction.

In competitive non-innovation markets the active role of sellers is to compete and the energy saving function is given by the capacity they have to cooperate with the prospects. These are naturally demand driven markets because the alternatives are already in the mind of the potential buyers.

In innovation marketing there is no substitute; therefore the proposal stands alone to sustain its validity and cannot be compared. This has two evident consequences.

On the one hand, the core of the approach to the market is the cooperation with the buyer which transforms the competitive capacity with the succedanea or inaction into the energy saving function.

On the other hand, this is a supply driven market which demands a sound knowledge of the subjective value of the innovative proposal in terms of its use value, its referential value which defines the succedanea that are considered, and the opportunity value which deals with the “urgent” need this proposal satisfies.

It is self-evident that innovation marketing is more energy consuming than demand driven markets. But this is compensated by the prices of innovative products.

Innovation marketing will be managed as demand driven markets when both market actions are mixed without separation. They belong to different species and cannot be integrated.

The final problem is that after the innovation has been absorbed by the environment, the supply driven market is transformed into a demand driven market.

This is a mutation that requires reorganizing the marketing process. And the innovation wheel begins to rotate again.

Unicist Press Committee

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using a logical approach to deal with evolution and became a private global decentralized world-class research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. http://www.unicist.org